This paper examines the cultural politics and commercialization
of Cinco de Mayo festivals in southern California from
1930 to 1950. In the context of racial segregation and limited
economic opportunities that inflicted the Mexican population,
Cinco de Mayo fiestas promoted cultural pride and community
solidarity. I show how Mexican Americans transformed Cinco
de Mayo, over span of two decades, from a strictly nationalist
celebration extolling the virtues of Mexican nationalism to
a bicultural event that expressed their newfound cultural
identity. The process of cultural change and "inventedness"
of ethnicity, however, was not without conflict and struggle
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). The festival’s predominantly
American-born and male leadership encountered tensions with
Mexican nationalist groups and female organizers reflecting
larger generational, ethnic, class, and gender divisions within
the community. Apart from these community pressures, Mexican
American fiesta organizers faced new challenges in the postwar
years: Anglo city officials and Mexican government representatives
intent on using Cinco de Mayo celebrations to promote
“goodwill” intercultural and inter-American relations as part
of the Good Neighbor Policy; companies seeking to advertise
their products, sponsor queen candidates, and transform the
patriotic celebration into a commercialized event. I argue
that Mexican Americans not only used Cinco de Mayo
festivals to promote ethnic solidarity but as an instrument
for political opposition, by appropriating the cultural pluralist
discourse of corporate sponsors to seek community resources
and demand full participation in the American body politic.
Mexican Americans seized upon what Mary Kay Vaughn (1994)
has termed, "interactive spaces" of patriotic festivals
to redefine identities and redirect energies towards community-building
projects, and most of all, demonstrate to the ethnic Mexican
and Anglo community that they had indeed become a political
force to be reckoned with.